A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

There was little follow-up to the remarkable advances seen in Classical Greece in the understanding of technology, medicine and geography. When the steam engine was invented in Alexandria about a hundred years after the birth of Jesus Christ, it remained a toy, and the ancient world failed to make the breakthrough in energy resources which occurred in England seventeen centuries later. Abundant slave labour, after all, blunted the need for any major advance in technology. Yet in the realm of ideas, philosophy and religious practice, Hellenistic civilization created a meeting place for Greek and oriental culture, which made it easy and natural for Jewish and then non-Jewish followers of Jesus Christ to take what they wanted from the ragbag of Greek thought which any moderately educated inhabitant of the Middle East would encounter in everyday conversation.